


self-made

by tin_girl



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Not Epilogue Compliant, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 09:22:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20992481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: For the first time ever, it occurs to Ginny that just like Cho is always going to be the one who cried, she herself will always be the one who didn’t, even though she did and did and did, choking on tears and smashing plates, trying to yell Fred back to life and scream Tom Riddle out of her head.She wonders if, were she to release a Snitch into the air, Cho would catch it first.She wonders if she herself would even bother.Ginny, destroying herself into being.





	self-made

**Author's Note:**

> Some of the reasons why I wrote this: 
> 
> Because to hell with girl hate.  
Because I find it amusing that they kept dating the same guys.  
Because I loved Ginny once and then forgot about it for years just because I didn't like her with Harry.  
Because Cho deserved better.  
Because why not?

Trees fall in the forest and make sounds

~Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

After the war, Ginny is all fire and no one wants to have their fingertips burned.

“Careful with that,” Hermione tells her when Ginny waves her wand and a piece of a Hogwarts wall flies up. All around, everyone is trying to put the scattered puzzle of a castle back together, and Ginny wants to laugh because she could do it with her eyes closed, that’s how well she remembers every classroom and every corridor, only she doesn’t want to, so, eyes wide open, she lets the block of stone crash into another and thinks of all the people who say she doesn’t deserve to grieve because she might have lost a brother, but she still has five others left.

Hermione yells something, the stones crumbling to pieces and about to rain down on the lot of them, only they keep on levitating, and Ginny glances at Cho Chang – wand raised, chin up, arm trembling but fingers steady. Ginny watches the pieces fit back together, soundless, the flick of Cho’s wrist a testament to all the carefully calligraphed letters she used to send to her mother at school, scribbling them on her knee in the Owlery and the writing beautiful anyway as Ginny fed the birds and pretended not to look.

The girl who cried when Harry Potter kissed her and look at her, eyes dry and smile spreading slow like butter on toast as she gets this riddle of a reconstruction right. For the first time ever, it occurs to Ginny that just like Cho is always going to be the one who cried, she herself will always be the one who didn’t, even though she did and did and _did_, choking on tears and smashing plates, trying to yell Fred back to life and scream Tom Riddle out of her head.

She wonders if, were she to release a Snitch into the air, Cho would catch it first.

She wonders if she herself would even bother.

She expects people to rush towards her and start yelling, a beehive of anger, but everyone is quiet like when they thought Harry died and only Cho makes a sound, a small sigh of exasperation, the kind a mother might breathe at a child’s scabbed knees before washing them clean and kissing them better.

Ginny hasn’t had anything kissed better in months.

“It’s our home,” Cho says, tilting her head at Ginny like Ginny is some curiosity worth a minute of attention and not a car crash waiting to happen.

Our home, as if they can exist in the same sentence as anything other than the ex-girlfriends of The Boy Who Lived.

“It’s our home,” Cho says again, walking up to Ginny and folding her hand over where Ginny’s knuckles are straining white on her wand. “Don’t you remember?” she asks, and Ginny wonders about these memories Cho is thinking of that include her and are worth smiling at.

*

When she broke up with Harry, somewhere inside, she was yelling at herself.

“But you were meant to be,” Molly said, devastated, and Ginny wanted to scream about how twins were meant to come in twos and how little boys with a mop of color-changing hair were meant to have parents, but she kept quiet for once.

“I’ll be here for Christmas,” Harry promised, kissing Molly on the cheek, and later Ron asked Ginny what it was all about over Butterbeer. She stared at him for a moment, too many freckles and a scar from some spell breaking his eyebrow in two, and saw it all over his face, what he thought of her – that she grew up to be herself out of necessity.

He was right, of course, but so very wrong, too.

“I killed the eleven-year-old me at last,” she said, smiling at him, and because the diary had already been destroyed, she imagined setting the girl who was stupid enough to read it on fire instead.

To think she remade herself so well that even Ron forgot the quiet, miserable mess she used to be! How she’d laugh if she remembered how to do it without alcohol.

Sometimes she wonders if breaking up with Harry wasn’t about being herself but about evading the inevitable rejection that would surely come as soon as he’d realize she’d never smile the way she used again.

“Like sunrise after the war,” he told her once, the tip of his finger to the corner of her mouth, but what did they know about wars back then?

*

After, Ginny doesn’t see Cho for months, and, slowly, her anger festers to resentment and her heartbreak overcooks into melancholy. She doesn’t break more than three plates per week and sometimes she even bothers to spell them back together, on her better days, when it doesn’t make her think of how she can’t do the same with people.

She’s getting tea with Luna, the only person she can stand these days – all that talk of Nargles and it’s so easy to forget the angry half-moons dug into the meat of her palms where she fists her hands after nightmares – and when Cho walks in, she pushes the door open so gently that the bell above it barely makes a sound.

“Oh-oh, look what the cat dragged in,” Ginny whispers, loud enough for Cho to hear, and Luna tilts her head as if she doesn’t understand the joke.

“I think she’s too heavy for cats,” she says, dumping a sugar cube in her teacup. “But then, she doesn’t look it.”

Cho, all water, all air, and Ginny feels her lips pulling into an unpleasant smile – scorched earth and forests burning.

When Cho smiles, it’s peaceful, and she leans over Ginny’s shoulder as if they’ve been this close to one another dozens of times.

“Rose,” she says, smelling the tea, and Ginny thinks of how they kept trying to catch the same Snitch back in school, how they kept dating each other’s exes, how none of them planned that antagonism, as if it had been dumped in their laps one afternoon for them to deal with whether they wanted to or not. She remembers Cho on the night of the Yule Ball, how she looked as if a young star fell from the sky and landed on her tongue like a blessing, and how, for a moment, Ginny forgot about her disappointment over not going to the ball with Harry, because who could remember anything with Cho in the room?

Nothing like the Cho standing at their table now – woolen cardigan, too-big glasses, and a messy ponytail – and yet she still looks like constellations are but accidental patterns of stars that gathered close together to see her better.

“How are you two?” Cho asks, putting her hair behind her ear, and Ginny wonders if she read enough books with sad endings before coming to Hogwarts to prepare herself for how the war would break more than bones. “I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“Why would you?” Ginny snaps. “We’re hardly friends.”

Once, during a Quidditch game, Ginny had wind in her hair and the Snitch almost, almost in her fingers, and it felt like she would outfly Cho and outfly her old self, too, outfly the mistakes, and the embarrassments, and the nightmares, only then Cho – who only ever cried – laughed like when ice breaks in early spring and Ginny almost fell off her broom.

“We’re not enemies, either,” Cho says, and takes a sip of Ginny’s tea, nonchalant, a glint in her eye that Ginny had, too, once. It reminds her of how when Harry used to tell her she was like fire in school, it was still a good thing.

How she was still a fireplace at the time, and not a funeral pyre. 

“Sure, I don’t hate you,” Ginny says, pushing back her chair and grabbing her coat by the collar. “But I don’t like you, either.”

When she leaves, she slams the door and the bell rings and rings.

*

“Naïve little Ginny,” Tom says in her nightmares sometimes, and she’s eleven again and never knows that she’s dreaming. “My little Ginny Weasley.”

At least when she wakes up now, it’s not like that summer after her first year at Hogwarts – sheets wet and her prohibited from spelling them clean, praying no one would notice as her pajama bottoms grew cold and as her heart tried to curl up small enough for no one to notice it was there, up for the taking and broken into pieces big enough to rebreak them.

*

The last time they meet by chance is in a cemetery, and Ginny remembers some old witch grabbing her by the sleeve in the street and mumbling something about the power of threes.

Ginny is crying, and when Cho stops next to her, she covers her face with the sleeve of her coat so Cho doesn’t see, now that she knows.

“It’s not his grave, anyway,” Ginny tells her, wind blowing her hair in her mouth. “He’s buried outside Shell Cottage.”

Cho doesn’t say anything, and in the silence of all the dead fast asleep no matter how much Ginny wants them to wake the fuck up, it occurs to Ginny that Cho must be here because she’s lost someone, too. It makes her feel pathetic, that she’s never considered it before, the same way she feels whenever she remembers that she should have tried harder to tell Fred and George apart, back when she still had the chance.

“I’m so sorry,” Cho says when Ginny starts sobbing into her sleeve. “I don’t have any tissues.”

Did you grow out of crying already, then? Ginny wonders, and tries to catch her breath. If so, teach me how.

When Cho starts wiping her tears off with the hem of her scarf, Ginny lets her because it’s the third time and Ginny believes in threes too much to expect to meet Cho like this ever again.

She believes in threes because there’s no point believing in twos.

“I don’t ever want to sleep again,” she whispers into the wool of Cho’s scarf, because nowadays Tom always waits in her dreams and inked pages leave too many papercuts for him not to find another opening to suck her soul out through. “N-never again.”

And Cho, the Ravenclaw darling with her golden-rimmed glasses and a book always in her bag, looks she doesn’t know any answers besides whispering something that sounds like a lullaby, and Ginny never knew that singing could be whispers.

“Just leave me alone,” she whines, and stumbles away, hair catching on Cho’s scarf. “It’s best if you leave me alone.”

Somewhere far away, the ocean throws itself on cliffs, and her brother is curled up on top of a cold grave, crying into the stone.

*

The next time she wakes from the nightmare, it’s too early. Tom hasn’t gotten up from the armchair he always sits in just yet – one of the Gryffindor armchairs, because of course he’d invade the places Ginny loves most, like mold growing where it’s the warmest, as if out of spite – hasn’t touched her yet when she blinks awake.

There’s an-almost weight on top of her and a forever of white, so that for a moment she thinks it’s all the pages of Tom’s diary blown loose, and that the nightmare isn’t over yet, after all, but then she realizes it’s plumage.

“A— swan?” she mumbles, and the Patronus leans its head down towards her. Ginny stares at it for a moment, and then bursts out laughing before remembering whose it must be. “A _swan_,” she says again with dawning realization, and when she throws her hairbrush at it, it goes right through. “I don’t want you here!” she yells, and the swan flies off but doesn’t disappear, curling up in the corner of the room instead, and staying there no matter how much she swears at it.

When she finally gives up and lies back down, it flies up to curl around her and cover her with its wings. When she falls asleep again, she doesn’t dream of anything.

*

The night after, Cho’s Patronus is back, and Ginny wants to hate it because she hasn’t been able to conjure her own in ages, but its wings are a comfort even though she can’t feel them, and it’s too hard to be angry over something like this – offered over miles and in spite of everything, more thoughtful that a million condolences and a thousand flowers spelled eternal – too hard to get angry over it even for Ginny.

She thinks of the Yule Ball again, and of how, at some point, her dress tore and she hid behind a column, fingers shaking too much for her to spell it fixed, and how Cho of all people found her.

“Here,” she said, tapping the fabric with her wand, and the threads mended like a song come together, but Ginny still felt like an ugly duckling, pale, freckled, red-haired, in a cheap dress, knobby-kneed, heart too close to skin where Tom could have pressed his fingertips if he’d tried, if he’d been real, and wasn’t he real?

Cho, two years older than her, and those two years felt like forever, as impossible a distance as walking from England to Denmark, too many miles and an ocean in between.

Cho said her name, and Ginny fisted her dress, thinking of how girls like Cho were too smart to get themselves tricked like she had.

“Let’s dance,” Cho said, extending her hand, and she looked too good to be mocking her, but Ginny had already grown out of naivety, she had, she had, she _had_.

She ripped the fabric of her dress where Cho mended it and smiled meanly, an ugly beginning to a story that would end well, no matter what.

Years later, when she conjured her Patronus for the first time, instead of thinking of how Harry had come for her to the Chamber of Secrets, she thought of how relieved all her family had been to see her, after.

*

They buy her a broom for Christmas, the newest model, as if the fact that she hasn’t played Quidditch in ages has anything to do with technicalities, and Ginny smiles her best smile, the one she had on her face back when Harry first kissed her.

He doesn’t kiss her now, but it’s okay, because now he’s just Harry, and she’s just Ginny, and brooms are just something you clean with.

Ron drops a hand on her shoulder and says, let’s race tomorrow, and Ginny nods even though she doesn’t remember how to fly. Maybe she’ll just climb to the roof and jump, letting the broom decide if she should live or die.

By the time the cake’s eaten and Hermione’s humming Silent Night, drowsy, head lolling on Harry’s shoulder, a tiny owl pecks at the window. When Molly lets it in, she has to bring the package to the light to be able to read the handwriting, eyesight grown poor and oh, how the years fly.

“For you, dear,” she says after a minute of squinting, handing the package to Ginny. Her name’s written in block letters, but Ginny recognizes the careful calligraphy, anyway. She tears the paper to shreds, everyone pretending not to gawk, and the dreamcatcher almost breaks in her fingers.

Inside, there’s a folded note that smells like roses.

The next time you dream of bad things, it says, let it catch them and then smash it to pieces.

Ginny smiles, because the only way of making herself she’s ever known was by destroying.

*

George can’t conjure a Patronus at all, and Ginny wants to send him her own like Cho did for her, only she still can’t conjure it either. She screams herself hoarse trying, and Ron joins her outside the house, cup of tea in hand and no shoes even though it’s February.

“So many good things have happened to us,” he says, and he sounds like he almost believes it. He smiles at her apologetically, and she remembers him stammering about how he should have taken care of her and paid more attention back in Hogwarts. Poor Ron, thinking she’s grown up to be herself because she had too many brothers to yell over and her mother’s blood boiling in her veins, when it’s never been about growing up at all, only about growing out of that weak self that let snakes bite her and cried after.

Weeks ago, when she woke up screaming, instead of smashing the dreamcatcher to pieces, she set it aflame.

*

The next time they meet, the power of threes is still intact, because it’s deliberate now, Ginny getting the address from Hannah Abbott and knocking on Cho’s door even though the doorbell’s right there.

“Long time no see,” Ginny sing-songs, pushing her way inside as soon as Cho opens the door, and smiling at how Cho’s socks don’t match. Miss Chang, all grace, all elegance, and yet glasses tilted and a tea stain on her t-shirt, the apartment all piles of clothes and unstable stacks of books.

“Why ever did you break up with Harry?” Ginny says, making herself tea, trying this cupboard and that one, raising her hand to silence her when Cho tries to tell her where to find it.

“I don’t know that I did,” Cho says. “We just grew apart. I suppose I was too— I had loved Cedric, you know, and, after, I wanted to swim in grief, not avoid it.”

“Let’s swim in it together, then, shall we?” Ginny says, and Cho looks at her like it’s the labyrinth and her heart breaking all over again.

“Oh, Ginny,” she whispers, because she’s been put back together for years, hasn’t she? Ginny’s too late to the party, everyone moving on and her running backwards as if trying to catch up with George, trying to grab his hand and run back to when Fred was there, to when she was still small enough to be safe, to when no one ever had to wonder how much of her would have been different, had there been no snake in Hogwarts pipes.

“I had a crush on you back in school, did you know?” Ginny laughs, sitting on top of Cho’s countertop and swinging her legs, pretending to be careless. “I sure didn’t!”

“I— That’s—”

“Ron said you never laughed with Harry, but what if it’s because he couldn’t make you laugh?” Ginny goes on, and she can’t stop now, she’s too far gone, she’s pouring gasoline all over herself and striking the match. “I bet I could make you laugh, like that day we played Quidditch, only who knows how much of it is all because of Dark Lords and basilisks and embarrassing Valentine’s Day cards?”

And Cho, this smart girl who cried under a mistletoe because she knew Christmas was not for pretending, this brilliant girl who must have guessed thousands of riddles, or talked the eagle knocker into letting her in whenever she didn’t know the answer because surely, even doors would fall in love with her – she smiles and, matter-of-fact, says something Ginny’s been waiting to hear for years.

“You’re here, and it doesn’t matter how you got here.”

And because it’s too good to be true, Ginny leaves without her shoes, without her coat, without her heart, and she almost feels bad about leaving something as drained and pathetic back at Cho’s, but she’s sure Cho’s too good to mind, and it has nothing to do with naivety at all.

It doesn’t occur to her for days that Cho might have said that to herself, too, and she thinks of the Patronus Charm again because she’d like to send Cho a message about how whatever she made herself to be is fine as it is, and it doesn’t matter how she got there, either.

*

She gets it right after another ten tries, thinking of Cho’s words, and she lets her Patronus sneak into George’s room, smiling to herself and wondering if Cho will get her another dreamcatcher. If she does, Ginny might just end up keeping it.

**Author's Note:**

> (It should have all the Weasleys and more Hermione and more Harry and less of an open ending but it felt right to end it where I did)
> 
> Thank you for reading! I hope you liked it and feedback would be much appreciated <3


End file.
